Lithuania

Lithuania is a country we have wanted to visit for quite some time!

It all began back in 2016 when Bobby was in college changing his career path to move from being a chef to working in IT, and it was there that he met (and made good friends with) some Lithuanians who had joined the course he was taking too, they took him to a local Lithuanian restaurant and taught him about the national dish cepelinai which he tried and loved!

Together they ate, drank and watched basketball. They spent hours talking about the cities and towns they were from which led to his fascination with the country for many many years!

Three cities stood out to him as places he wanted to visit once he had finished college and these were:

• Vilnius (the capital city which is pronounced vil-nus not vil-nee-uhs like we kept hearing many non-natives saying on YouTube before we came! 😁).
• Trakai (pronounced Track-A not Track-I).
• And finally Kaunas (which is pronounced co-nas not cow-nas).

So after finishing college and having spent many, many years telling Tammy how awesome it would be to visit Lithuania she also became interested in visiting this unique place, and so the goal of visiting Lithuania was set!

Finally in 2024, 8 years after Bobby first met those awesome, friendly Lithuanians and a year after setting up the channel we decided to take TeamMcGrath out to Lithuania and started off in Kaunas with the goal of visiting Vilnius and Trakai too...we took so long to get there as we wanted to have enough time on YouTube to film the best content we could, and provide our truest first impressions in 4k quality.

But that's not all...it was in Lithuania that we decided to also change up our vlogging style too!

You see we would rarely interact with locals in our videos as we didn't know how people would react with a camera in front of them, but as we knew enough about the friendly people of Lithuania we decided to give it a go and filmed more natural interactions.

We also wanted to capture the moment in a more raw format so decided to film longer takes where we would provide a more "real time" feel to the vlogs with the hope of making the person watching feel like they are part of the journey too!

Despite our concerns with changing up our format and style, it went great and as a result we caught some very interesting content with an authentic, raw experience. We couldn't think of a better place to try something new and capture a real vlogging experience than the country we had wanted to visit for so long.

For us this was some of our best content as it really captured how we get to know the people of the places we visit, and also captured each new experience we would have in real time too. We hope you enjoy the new vlogging style as much as we did filming it! 🙂❤️